If NASA faked the moon landings, does the agency have any credibility at all? Was the Space Shuttle program also a hoax? Is the International Space Station another one? Do not dismiss these hypotheses offhand. Check out our wider NASA research and make up your own mind about it all.

Sounds like a perfectly viable experiment in which to gather verifiable data... though you'd think there should be something more sophisticated than a sextant nowadays.

It sounds like we'll end up needing a 'Cluesforum amateur astronomy' team

As for Simon's reply I might be a little confused but I thought it was Evil Edna (aka Psyopticon) who proposed that Satellites (or at least the ISS) were near earth asteroids... and that Simon thought the ISS was a series of high altitude military drones?

Either way there must be hundreds of thousands if not millions of books out there written pre-1950's... can any Cluesforum reader or contributor find a pre-1950's book passage to help verify this modern day 'satellites' as 'Near Earth Asteroids' theory?

It's such a simple idea that, to me, it make perfect sense in terms of basic illusion principles... though somebody pre-1950 should have written about these things.

It looks like we'll end up needing a 'Cluesforum historical astronomy' team as well.

Aren't all NEAs further away from Earth than the Moon? If so then all "satellites" that transit the Moon's path would be seen passing behind the moon rather than in front of it.

Yet I have seen a number of YT videos that show "satellites" transiting in front of the moon. I realize such videos could be fake but then I would think there would still be some videos showing the transit behind the moon but I haven't seen any that show that.

In any case, if NEA's are being used then it would be easy to debunk them due to this moon transit test. This makes me think that the "satellites" are some sort of high altitude conventional aircraft.

So, let's say one is actually able to view an object that one considers a man-made satellite and by using the mathematical formula posted above, able to determine the height of the object, which turns out to be Lower Earth Orbit (or higher) ...

Would it then be safe to logically conclude that this object that one can allegedly view with the naked eye might be at the height claimed, but must therefore be much larger than a dishwasher sized, man-made satellite (i.e. a "Near Earth Orbit") ?

Critical Mass wrote:As for Simon's reply I might be a little confused but I thought it was Evil Edna (aka Psyopticon) who proposed that Satellites (or at least the ISS) were near earth asteroids... and that Simon thought the ISS was a series of high altitude military drones?

Either way there must be hundreds of thousands if not millions of books out there written pre-1950's... can any Cluesforum reader or contributor find a pre-1950's book passage to help verify this modern day 'satellites' as 'Near Earth Asteroids' theory?

Dear CM,

Let us make a clear distinction between the "ISS Thing" (which is very bright and looks like cruising at relatively low altitude) - and the rest of the >insert number of choice< alleged man-made satellites up supposedly orbiting up there.

I don't think anyone would deny that there's been a constant traffic (ever since the dawn of times) - visible with naked eyes - of Near-Earth-Asteroids, but you'd need to be located in ideal areas to see them as often as I've seen them in my lifetime. (Btw, I think any astronomer will tell you that NEA's are far, far larger than dish-washing machines - and that most of them circulate between Mars and Jupiter - far, far higher than we are told man-made satellites are placed). As a kid - in the early '70's, I'd see them flying by in the Norwegian summernight skies at close intervals (at least one every 10min or so) and they would look like tiny, faint 'moving stars', wholly different in aspect (distance-wise) from the "ISS" flyovers I can observe today here over Rome (where I, alas, hardly can spot any NEA's at all). It's funny, you know: I can remember my uncle (a fairly dim chap) saying that the 'moving stars' were "probably those Soviet & American satellites" and that, in the back of my mind, I thought: woah - they must've launched sooo many of them! But get this: it has only recently dawned upon me that my father once told me that he also saw them (the faint 'moving stars') as a kid. Well, when he was a kid, Sputnik (the alleged first-ever man-made satellite) was still years away from being "launched"... Too bad my dad passed away in 1990 - he'd be able to testify / corroborate this much on Cluesforum for himself...

Everybody, right now, or first thing tomorrow morning, wherever you are in the world, poll our generation's surviving old folks! Ask them what they remember seeing in the sky prior to the 1940's, specifically regarding things they do not consider to be "weather balloons".

Human perception of near-Earth objects as benign objects of fascination or killer objects with high risk to human society have ebbed and flowed in the short period of human history that NEOS have been scientifically observed.

And just because an object has been 'discovered' doesn't make it visible to the naked eye for instance this 1950's NEA is alleged to have a brightness of 17.0.

In short Cluesforum & it's contributors have some work to do in regards to this topic...

(i) Verify as many 'Satellite' observations* as possible & get an altitude via equation(ii) Find an (alive) amateur astronomer who saw, with his own eyes, NEA's pre-1957(ii) Find some reference to these things in the thousands of years of human literature

If these are done then great, you've solved it... and provided a well founded alternative theory to the Neutral observer.

It goes without saying that Ipersonally would place more trust in Simon's dad versus NASA at this point... however, and for a Neutral observer, this clearly isn't a good argument.

* I agree we should leave the ISS separate for now as it didn't visibly exist in the 20th century & it is so bright. Although if we can prove that it is fake (crossing fingers for better weather... I've got another period of 'double flyover' passes coming up) & get an altitude for 'the thing' then that obviously makes the argument against all other Satellites so much stronger.

That's quite an amazing curve... So, between 1980 and today, we have discovered MOST of the NEA's we know about today?

And - roughly during the same, short period of our planet's history - we also launched a huge fleet of man-made satellites which caused thousands of small space debris?

[Caption for below graph}: "The generation of artifical space debris has continued throughout the space age. The graph below, from the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office shows the number of space objects tracked and catalogued by the US Space Surveillance Network."http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/gsd/gsd.htm

"Space debris exists throughout all regions of space that we have so far been able to observe, and it has done so for a very long time. We refer to this as natural space debris. It is present in the solar system, in other stellar systems, in the space between stars and in the space between galaxies. Some of this debris hinders our direct observation of various regions. An example of this is the dust that obscures much of the milky way, including our galactic centre from our vision. This is seen as dark clouds in the night sky. One prominent southern hemisphere dust cloud is the 'Coal Sack', just to the left of the Southern Cross.

What is new since the start of the space age is the presence of artificial space debris in orbit around the Earth. This comes from man's activities in space, and it is starting to cause us problems. This guide will concentrate on discussing artificial orbital space debris, although comparison will occasionally be made with the natural space debris near the Earth."

As well as artificial space debris there is also a population of natural space debris (meteoroids) that, while they don't orbit the Earth, do pass through all orbital altitudes. In fact prior to the space age, some scientists predicted that the hazard from natural debris might be so great as to make space travel very dangerous. In fact NASA spent considerable effort in trying to evaluate this hazard. Ground visual and radar observations were examined, and most of the early satellite carried meteoroid detectors.

Yeah, right ..."meteoroid detectors" - back in the '60's or 70's, eh? How exactly did they work?

And what exactly are "natural space debris (meteoroids)"? Are they small NEA's, so small that they're invisible from Earth? If so, how do we (or NASA) know about them? Or may we reasonably suspect that the "natural space debris" (that NASA talks about) are just a convenient misnomer for NEA's, which astronomers have always been able to observe?

*************************But hey - we may soon be treated with a chain-reaction / extinction of man-made satellites...Donald Kessler"Donald Kessler was the first Chief Scientist and Program Manager of the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office. He is widely remembered for the 1978 paper on the possibility of collisional cascading leading to a severe orbital debris crisis. This is now referred to as the Kessler syndrome." http://webpages.charter.net/dkessler/

"More than 300,000 asteroids have been identified and cataloged; more than a million are believed to exist in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, with many more in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune."(...)"By 1890 more than 300 asteroids had been discovered by visual means. In 1891, Max Wolf introduced the method of identifying an asteroid by the record of its path on an exposed photographic plate; it appears as a short line in a time exposure, rather than as the sharp point of a star."http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/science/asteroid.html

Yes, asteroids have been observed / documented / cataloged for at least hundreds of years (and likely ever since the dawn of times) - and even photographed LONG before Sputnik was allegedly launched in 1957!... Come on, folks - I really don't think I need to call my father or my grandpa up there - to corroborate such a fact. Having said that, dear Cluesforum readers, please DO ask your parents / grandparents if they can recall observing (prior to 1957) what looked like moving stars as they sky-gazed at night (something that, evidently, remarkably few people ever do) !

Gosh, that IS an incredible photo that surely must have been taken from space! Yep, no question about it. It couldn't possibly have been taken from, say, an airplane, no-sir-eee! And, the other photos in this article are just as incredible as this one!

Check it out because I'm sure you will be very impressed with the photos (as long as you've never flown in an airplane).

I have been reading some material on the subject of LASERs (all caps), now accepted as the lesser seeming lasers (in the interesting case of an acronym apparently becoming a normal word). Please forgive me if my thinking is not as clear or cogent as Simon, or if this doesn't really give people an "Aha, of course!" moment. I recognize I do not have Simon's thinking skills or logic and I am going out on a limb here. Please feel free to explain to me why this shouldn't work the way I am imagining. But please hear me out and see if you can follow what I'm suggesting.

Did you know that they have been around in the public eye since 1960, but theorized and researched from the 1950's? Just around the era of the great "space race"? I wonder why there may have been such a race for the maser or laser at the same time that public perceptions were becoming very important (in the eyes of some) to control.

I have also been thinking about the intensely bright and luminous nature of the "thingies" in the sky, which seem to even move faster than any kind of jet-propelled thing could possibly move. How can something so very bright, which travels through Earth's umbra without darkening, and so very fast, be anything both human made and yet fit within our known technologies of a vessel? This makes me think that some of the things are not Near Earth Object asteroids or things of matter. Perhaps a few (even one?) of what we might call "satellites" may be some kind of light phenomenon. Perhaps a hoaxed light source or a simulation of a NEO might be easier than landing and refueling a physical air-based object.

I don't think I buy the "Project Bluebeam" conspiracy chewing gum, which belongs in the realm of Judy Wood's "energy beams" and UFO myths. However, I do know that waves exist, lights exist, and amazing as they are, lasers exist. I do wonder about the possibility of some kind of distantly high airliner with a powerful light of some kind shining directly down, as has been suggested as a plausible replication of the theorized but unproven "satellite" technology. But what about a beam pointing up and slightly away from the craft? Might there have been experiments to create a satellite image by exciting electrons in the ionosphere using something like a laser — whereby the beam itself is both invisible and unimpeded — and therefore the only thing that appears from ground level is a bright, rapidly moving, glowing dot? Could something prevent stretching of a circle? Or compensate? Like this?

Was it not hypothesized that an ideal ionosphere would be artificially stabilized for the purposes of bouncing light waves and therefore feigning the satellite network? Could this stability result in something viable for this purpose?

What if some property of the ionosphere or a similar electro-magnetic layer above the Earth were capable of maintaining a predictable reaction to coherent (size-stable) light?

Could a stealth aircraft — 20 km high, above the highest clouds — project a kind of energy "spotlight" that is moved strategically, starting just behind the aircraft moving just slightly but steadily faster than the aircraft, and ultimately retiring over the horizon before the aircraft reaches it? Could the shape of the curvature of light have to do with our ability to be fooled, due to our errant assumptions (given to us by NASA) about the capabilities and behavior of light?

Presumably these objects/lights can be seen and tracked so that it can be determined when they will be seen again [from what direction/speed etc.]?If so, using an aircraft to project a beam of some sort would be subject to inaccuracies/malfunctions which [if anyone is tracking the said light] would lead to more questions than it would solve?It could be possible to do it accurately from a fixed position [as in sitting on the sofa with the laser-lite pen teasing the cats at home [we being the cats in this instance]] but this would be affected by cloud cover and could show the source being from the ground.

Thanks, lux. I am just trying to work it out since we are allowing 'musings' about the so-called 'satellite' technology in this thread after all.

pov603 wrote:Presumably these objects/lights can be seen and tracked so that it can be determined when they will be seen again [from what direction/speed etc.]?If so, using an aircraft to project a beam of some sort would be subject to inaccuracies/malfunctions which [if anyone is tracking the said light] would lead to more questions than it would solve?It could be possible to do it accurately from a fixed position [as in sitting on the sofa with the laser-lite pen teasing the cats at home [we being the cats in this instance]] but this would be affected by cloud cover and could show the source being from the ground.

Thanks for honest feedback. The cloud thing does worry me. I really do subscribe to the ideas of asteroids, NEOs and aircraft. On the other hand, I think the "magic" of beam technologies is that you can excite certain layers while others remain undisturbed. For example, with this experimental 3D imaging technology where they cause oxygen to explode in the air in a pattern, might the right kind of laser explode molecules at a very high altitude layer? There might not be any risk at all for an accurate technology, if we can determine what combo could be used, except for power going out in the middle of the projection. Even then, it could be said it goes into the "umbra" of Earth.

full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnoEymLoSsE

I don't think this is very related, and again please forgive me for bringing these up. I am not trying to confuse the issue at all — just hoping to tap some knowledge. And I will leave it at this for now since it doesn't seem to be very inspiring so far.